The market for metalworking fluids, including forming fluids, protecting fluids, removal fluids and treating fluids, is growing and is associated with the development of the transportation industry, metal fabrication industry, machinery, primary ferrous products, and primary aluminum products.
There are four major types of metal working fluids: straight oil based products, soluble oils, semi-synthetic oils and synthetic metal working fluids. The latter three are all water based fluids. Among these four types of metal working fluids, synthetic metal working fluids are growing, at the expense of straight-oil-based products and soluble oils. In addition to other factors such as improved technologies, enhanced environmental requirements and the installation of new equipments, the increased application of high-speed cutting technology and the continuous rise of crude oil prices are the two major driving factors leading to growth of water based metalworking fluids. This is especially the case for green-field investments.
Water based synthetic metal working fluids have been known for many years. These typically contain 90-99% water and include performance boosting additives. These fluids provide excellent cooling capacity and in many cases good lubrication such that the metal parts that are machined have good surface finishes and tool life is considered good. However it is widely acknowledged that water based fluids often do not have the excellent lubrication properties that straight oil based products can have. Furthermore they can be prone to causing ferrous corrosion due to their high water content if they are not adequately protected with corrosion inhibitors. Many efforts have been focused on the development of new additives for synthetic metal working fluids. One area of exploration is in new foam control additives. Foam control is an increasingly important performance need since machining speeds in the production engineering industry continue to increase resulting in higher fluid turbulence and air ingress into the fluid. Polyalkylene glycols have been used as foam control additives in water based metalworking fluids and these tend to be block or reverse block copolymers based on ethylene oxide and propylene oxide. One example is Pluronic PE6100 from BASF.